Three New Buildings About Communication Are Also Designed to Communicate

By ROBIN POGREBIN

Published: September 19, 2007

Polshek Partnership Architects does not specialize in media buildings. But in an odd confluence, three such projects by this firm are opening in succession. Among them is the enlarged S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, which is to be dedicated today by Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts Jr.

The $23 million Newhouse School, an expansion and renovation of two existing buildings, features a three-story glass atrium intersected by pedestrian bridges and -- perhaps most strikingly -- a glass curtain with the words of the First Amendment projected onto it.

On Monday the new home of the WGBH public broadcasting station opened in Brighton, Mass. The third building, the Newseum and Freedom Forum headquarters, a bigger, higher-tech reinvention of the former Newseum in Arlington, Va., is to open in Washington next spring.

Each of these media-themed clients was looking for a strong new physical identity, something that Polshek Partnerships recently provided for such prominent public institutions as the Brooklyn Museum, with its contemporary glass entrance pavilion and plaza (2004), and the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, with its enormous sphere in a transparent cube (2000).

At the Newhouse School the architects faced the challenge of uniting and reviving two existing buildings, a 1964 structure by I. M. Pei and a 1974 design by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. To ease movement between the buildings and draw students out of the underground spaces in Mr. Pei's building, Polshek Partnership came up with the three-story atrium, which the bridges link to surrounding classrooms, lounges and research spaces.

''There were no social spaces for people to interact,'' said Tomas J. Rossant, the partner in charge of the project. ''Meeting rooms, work rooms, digital rooms, where they eat -- all that sort of stuff has moved toward the light.''

Although the words of the First Amendment are stable, they run behind beams of the building, creating a news-ticker effect. ''We wanted to do something that felt digital, that felt kinetic,'' Mr. Rossant said.

WGBH, which produces high-profile public television series, including ''Nova,'' ''Frontline'' and ''The American Experience,'' was looking to step out with a unified, arresting complex. Having formerly been scattered among 12 different buildings and hidden behind the Harvard Business School in Allston, Mass., the station moved to a new site adjacent to the Massachusetts Turnpike in Brighton.

The lead Polshek architect on the project, Richard Olcott, said the firm decided to make the most of the station's captive audience: commuters in rush-hour traffic. WGBH was ''interested in being visible, having been invisible for so long,'' he said. ''You can see the thing from two miles away.''

The building's facade is itself a media element: a digital skin that will project varying LED images every day. (The city prohibits any text display there because of broader concerns about commercialization.) On a gray morning, for example, the electronic mural could display fluffy white clouds in a deep blue sky.

The notion is to have the building consistently engaging with the public. ''Hopefully people will think, 'What is WGBH going to throw at me today?' '' Mr. Olcott said.

With its new building WGBH also wanted to foster more internal communication between its television, radio, Internet and other operations, the architects said. The new 310,000-square-foot headquarters at Market and Beacon Streets encompasses an existing seven-story office building that houses support staff and two levels of television and radio studios on the site of a former parking lot.

They are connected by a two-story bridge that encloses offices for staff members who generate the station's content. Because of the project's limited $85 million budget, the architects used corrugated metal siding and glass. Since everyone could not get a window, no one got one; the offices are on the interior, and the circulation is at the perimeter.

''The light is very democratic,'' Mr. Olcott said.

The neighborhood itself is in transition, with low-lying houses juxtaposed with a new headquarters for New Balance shoes. Right under WGBH, the Stockyard steakhouse boasts of roast beef hash ''made daily'' and ''the best fresh lobster pie in New England.''

''It's not Beacon Hill,'' Mr. Olcott said.

The First Amendment is integrated into the Newseum in Washington, too, inscribed in stone on the facade facing Pennsylvania Avenue. But the institution -- at $450 million and 550,000 square feet, the largest and most expensive of Mr. Polshek's three projects -- will be largely transparent in appearance.

''We want it to be the opposite of the Washington aesthetic,'' said Robert Young, the associate partner in charge of the project, ''open, accessible, easy to get into.''

Seven years in the making, the Newseum is made up of three parallel buildings, like the pages of a newspaper. Exhibits include the first news helicopter, the first news satellite, the top of the radio tower from Tower 2 of the World Trade Center and the largest piece of the Berlin Wall outside Germany today, the architects said.

News personnel from various networks and cable stations are expected to broadcast from the studio, with its real-life backdrop of the nation's Capitol.

The building's site, halfway between the Capitol and the White House, echoes its watchdog role, the architects said. ''We have to keep an eye on these two branches of the government,'' Mr. Young said.

PHOTOS: Exteriors of the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, left, and the Newseum in Washington.; The new headquarters of the WGBH public broadcasting station in Brighton, Mass. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY POLSHEK PARTNERSHIP ARCHITECTS) (pg. E5)